


Shapes (and Other Unidentified Flying Objects)

by jibberjabber13



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Existentialism, F/F, Friendship, Implied Crush, Mental Health Issues, References to a Dissociative Episode, Road Trips, Some Humor, Therapy, UFOs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 05:52:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19761928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibberjabber13/pseuds/jibberjabber13
Summary: “What would you do without me, Bea?”“Probably live the peaceful and quiet life I deserve.”Bea drives Mae to her first therapy appointment in Bright Harbor.





	Shapes (and Other Unidentified Flying Objects)

The world always looked less threatening to Mae from behind a window, like nothing could touch her with a barrier keeping things around her from melting into unrecognizable blurs. There was something peaceful about it. But in a way, it was also kind of sad that she was so scared of what might happen outside of Possum Springs that she felt the need to hide herself away.

The day Mae realized this about herself, she was sitting in the passenger seat of Bea Santello’s car. The sun shone softly on the windshield while the sprawling highway to Bright Harbor stretched ahead of them. 

“Would you stop fiddling with the radio for like, one goddamn second?” Bea’s words were garbled around the unlit cigarette that dangled from her lips. She hadn’t hit a long enough red light before they reached the highway to pull out a match.

Mae paused with her hand on the car’s radio knob, gave it a good ten seconds, then went back to flipping through all the radio stations. 

“Nah,” she said with what she hoped was the air of someone who totally hadn’t been contemplating her fickle and crumbling mental state less than a minute ago. “Gotta find something good.”

The next station the radio picked up crackled with static.

“Yup,” Bea said, popping the ‘p.’ “You sure picked a good one there.”

“Gregg lets me pick the station whenever we take your car with Angus,” Mae said and crossed her arms over her chest. “And he doesn’t complain about it.”

“Yeah, well, Gregg lets you do just about anything,” Bea said. “He’s an enabler.”

Mae thought about her friend with a pang of sadness. It had been about two months since Gregg and Angus finally made their big move to Bright Harbor. They sent her a postcard the week after they moved in, with a photo of Gregg standing in the kitchen of their new apartment plastered over the image of a park on the front. 

_"Mae, you have to let me change."_

Things were different now, but she had Bea. And maybe she’d changed herself, more than she realized.

Another car rushed by the driver side window, and it became clear how slow and rusty Bea’s car had gotten over the years she’d had it. The old thing barely sputtered along the highway, but it was the only way that Mae had to get to Bright Harbor, where Bea had booked her an appointment with a therapist. A real one, too—not just Dr. Hank, who was much better at treating the common cold than trying to untangle the mess that was Mae’s brain.

As road signs passed them, and the miles to Bright Harbor grew smaller and smaller, Mae started to feel apprehensive. It was one thing to tell her parents why she’d dropped out of school—it hadn’t even been easy for her to do that, really—but telling a stranger somehow seemed way scarier.

**Cedarsburg - 10 miles**

The town name prodded something in Mae’s memory.

“Oh my God, Bea,” she said. “We have to stop in Cedarsburg.”

“Mae, your appointment is—”

“In like two hours because your boring and practical ass wanted to leave so early,” Mae said. “Come on, we gotta go to Cedarsburg. I read about that place once, and they say actual aliens landed there. Like a real UFO. How sweet is that?”

“No. No way.”

To Mae’s surprise, it only took less than five minutes to annoy Bea enough into taking the exit towards Cedarsburg. The town itself wasn’t much to look at; it was just a few scattered houses here and there, and a lot of open land. The emptiness reminded her a bit of Possum Springs.

They followed a sign with a Sharpie arrow pointing towards the “Alien Site” and wound up on a gravel path leading to the supposed UFO landing. As they stepped out of the car and onto the crunch of the gravel, Bea let out a huge sigh.

“This is so stupid,” she said. “Why did I let you talk me into this again?” From her dress pocket she pulled out a matchbook and fumbled with it for a few moments before lighting up her cigarette.

“Admit it, I add so much fun and excitement to your existence,” Mae said. “What would you do without me, Bea?”

Bea’s eyes rolled up towards the sky for a split second as she exhaled a long puff of smoke. “Probably live the peaceful and quiet life I deserve.”

The path took them through a small forest, trees lining the sides and covering the ground in a shadow that would have been menacing were it not for the bright sun filtering through the leaves. Mae shivered as she recalled the last time they were alone in the woods and decided it was best not to think about it too hard.

“So what’s the deal with this place, anyway?” Bea said.

“Oh, it’s super cool,” Mae said. “There was like this huge object that flew through the sky completely on fire and landed in the woods outside the town here. A ton of people who saw it apparently said it gave off blue smoke and was vibrating and other crazy stuff.”

“Huh.”

“But then the police like immediately sealed the whole area off, and when they left, the object was gone. Never seen again,” Mae said. “Really strange shit.”

After walking for some time, the path dumped them out in a clearing with a statue set on top of a wooden pedestal. A plaque underneath it detailed the UFO sighting and stated that the statue was a recreation of the aircraft that landed in the very field they were standing in. It was shaped like a large acorn turned upside down.

“And that thing up there,” Bea said and pointed to the statue, “is what it looked like?”

“Supposedly, yeah,” Mae said.

Bea squinted at the UFO statue for a few moments, trying to get a better look at it. “Looks pretty suspicious to me,” she finally said.

“ _So_ suspicious.”

“Like, _super_ suspicious.”

“The most suspicious,” Mae said. “The most alien…est.”

Silence fell between them as they stared at the statue. Mae felt that the more she looked at it, the more she believed it really was an alien spacecraft from another galaxy or planet or whatever. It was cooler to think it was, at any rate.

“I dunno if I believe in all that,” Bea said. “Aliens or whatever.”

“You don’t?” Mae said with a surprised lift of her eyes as she glanced up at Bea. “But the universe is just…so big. How can we be the only forms of life out there?”

Bea shrugged. Her cigarette was down to a nub, so she tossed it on the dirt and stubbed it out with her boot. “Maybe it’s kind of depressing, but it’s better to just focus on reality here,” she said. “No use in getting caught up wondering if there’s a meaning to it all or life elsewhere when you’ve got a job and a family to care for. Bills and all that.”

Mae started to laugh.

“What?” Bea frowned.

“You’re like, the most boring person in the world, Bea,” Mae said. “But…” Her expression softened as she looked down at the ground in a sudden moment of sheepishness. “I’m glad you’re my friend. You’re a good person.”

Bea smiled, but it was just a quick twitch of the lips and then it was over. “Yeah, yeah,” she said as they made their way back to the car. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

* * *

The therapist’s office was on the top floor of an already crowded building. It was also very small. To Mae, it seemed like just a hallway with a couple of doors and a tiny alcove for a waiting room. She sat down in one of the three chairs in the waiting area, while Bea took the one next to her. They spent the next fifteen minutes halfheartedly flipping through the magazines on the end table in front of them.

The two of them never spoke much about the night Mae had opened up in Gregg’s apartment about her mental health. It was just sort of understood that something had shifted between them, almost imperceptible to anyone but themselves. Maybe it was just a mutual knowledge of what it meant to struggle to get by each day. Or maybe it was what they’d figured out at Jackie’s party. Friends by proximity. They needed each other.

Mae hoped it wasn’t just proximity that kept them together, though. She cared about Bea too much at this point for it to just be that.

“Mae Borowski?”

Her new therapist was tall and lanky, and her head almost brushed the low ceiling. She wore glasses with corners that turned up, and she pushed the frames up her nose with an index figure before smiling at Mae. She introduced herself as Marcia and didn’t want Mae to call her a doctor.

“How are you doing today?” she said as Mae followed her down the hallway and into one of the doors.

“I’m okay,” Mae said. “I could be doing better, considering I’m here.”

The room was as cramped as the rest of the office, but it somehow felt cozy instead of claustrophobic. Marcia gestured for Mae to sit down on a blue couch with a hole forming in the armrest. She plopped down and sank into the cushions with arms crossed over her chest. Behind Marcia’s own chair was a bookshelf filled up to the top of the room next to a lamp with a shade that had little beads dangling from it.

“So, what’s been going on lately?”

Mae cleared her throat and looked out the window to her side. In that dim office, the city down below seemed so unfamiliar and far away, and it started to hit her how far from home she was. Outside, small drops of rain had started to come down and run down in lines along the window’s glass. 

“Well, I saw a UFO earlier,” she said as she turned back to look at Marcia. “Or where they thought a UFO landed once.”

“That sounds interesting,” Marcia said. “Want to tell me more about that?”

“It just made me think a lot. About us and why we’re here and stuff.” Mae unraveled her arms and began tracing patterns in the denim of her jeans. “I just find it hard to believe that we’re like, on our own out here in the universe. Like how can we be out here living all this time, and no one has ever come and looked for us? When I think about the idea of being in this giant universe alone, I get so sad.”

Marcia paused, pursed her lips. She scribbled something down in her notebook before speaking again. “I can see why you came here.”

“Yeah, well.” Mae shrugged. “That and I beat a guy up with a softball bat once.”

She could see Marcia freeze, every muscle in her fingers tensing around that pen she held in her hand, as Mae said the words out loud. The incident that seemed so ingrained in her memory that not a day went by where it wasn’t in the back of her mind somewhere.

“Can you tell me more about that?”

“I dunno. I don’t really know how to describe it,” Mae said, fully aware that what she was going to say wouldn’t make any sense and that she was starting to babble. “It’s like, one second things were normal, and then things around me suddenly felt like they weren’t real. Like everything was just a cardboard version of itself, a dumb object in a universe that’s huge and doesn’t even give a shit about me. They were all just…shapes.”

Mae stopped, feeling the fur of her cheeks starting to burn. Marcia hadn’t written anything down in a while. Probably because Mae was clearly such a basket case that she was beyond repair, or something.

“Go on.” Marcia’s tone was gentle, comforting. “I’m listening.”

“And when it all turned to shapes, something in me snapped. Next thing I knew I was standing over this poor kid with a softball bat, just beating him over and over and watching the blood come out of him like more red fucking shapes.” Mae’s voice started to rise the more she spoke. “I was this total monster, and everyone…everyone was so scared around me for the longest time. And to be honest, I’m…I’m still scared of myself.”

As soon as the tears started to run down her cheeks, Marcia pulled out a tissue from the box next to her chair and handed it to Mae, who took it and wiped furiously at her eyes to try and stop the flow of tears.

“Mae. Please don’t be upset,” Marcia said as she leaned over and placed a delicate hand on Mae’s knee. “It sounds like what you had was a dissociative episode. You’re not a freak or a terrible person. These are things we can treat.”

“A…what?”

“It’s when you experience a significant disconnect between real life, or your reality, and what’s going on in your head,” Marcia explained. “Your brain was basically making you feel like everything around you wasn’t real, which is one way it can manifest itself. It’s not uncommon to have out-of-body-experiences like you had, almost as if you’re watching yourself do something terrible. Like in a movie. And a sense of detachment is also pretty common.”

“Oh.” Mae shifted in her seat. “Well, that’s, um. Accurate.”

“Has anything like that happened to you since then, or was that the only time?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” Mae said with a small, weak laugh.

“That’s okay,” Marcia said. “We’ve got time. Like an hour of it.”

Mae closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She imagined she was back on that couch with Bea, telling her about all the darkness that lived in heart. 

Bea, who made her feel safe. 

Bea, who drove her all the way to Bright Harbor for this.

Bea, who, despite all their differences, always cared about her well being. 

Then, for the first time since the night of her confession to Bea, Mae opened her eyes and started to tell her story.

* * *

The ride back to Possum Springs was mostly quiet. Mae didn’t even try to turn the radio on again when she got back in the car, which Bea commented on but let slide. The rain had stopped somewhere during her therapy session, and it was now a clear-skied day once again.

“So, um,” Bea said, breaking the silence. “How did it go?”

“It was good,” Mae said and swallowed. “It was…a start.”

She could hear Bea let out an exhale of relief from beside her.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Bea said.

They drove into Possum Springs in the height of mid-afternoon, when everything felt sleepy and slowed down. People ambled along the streets, taking in the arrival of spring and its warm weather and new flowers. Outside of Mae’s house, Mr. Penderson was busy trimming his hedges and chastising a group of young kids for stepping too close to his property. Two houses down, Mr. Twigmeyer greeted Mae with a friendly smile and a wave.

Even after she got out of the car and shut the door, Mae lingered, feeling like there was more that she wanted to say to Bea. She walked around to the driver’s side and opened her mouth as if she was going to speak.

_You make everything feel less like they’re just shapes and more like there are things that can be nice in this world. You make it more safe to be in. I feel—_

“Hey, Mae?” Bea stuck her head out the car window, then took the cigarette out of her mouth and pinched it delicately between her fingers, holding it away from her mouth. A frown formed on her face. “You alright?”

“Yeah, I—” Mae shook her head, looked down and then back up. “Beabea?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for everything.”

It wasn’t the full truth, but it was getting there—and maybe that would have to be enough for today.

Bea lifted the corners of her mouth just enough that Mae could tell she was trying to smile. Mae decided to take it as a win. 

“Anytime, Maeday. Anytime.”

As Bea drove away towards the center of town, exhaust fumes sputtering out of the tailpipe of that rusty old car, Mae looked up at the sun and smiled to herself. Then she thought for the first time in a while that the world might just get brighter after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! Thanks for reading. I really loved this game, especially Mae and Bea's relationship throughout the story, and wanted to write a little something for it. I hope you enjoyed it and feel free to leave any feedback below if you feel so inclined :)


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